A massive collision of galaxies sparked by one traveling at a scarcely-believable 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) has been seen in unprecedented detail by one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes.
The dramatic impact was observed in Stephan’s Quintet, a nearby galaxy group made up of five galaxies first sighted almost 150 years ago.
It sparked an immensely powerful shock akin to a “sonic boom from a jet fighter”—the likes of which are among the most striking phenomena in the universe.
Returning to those Red Monsters, the new JWST data showed that these galaxies produce stars at about two to three times more efficiently than galaxies in the later universe.
The stellar masses of these three galaxies are so large that they require a stellar-mass conversion efficiency of about 50%, higher than the typical efficiency observed in galaxies today. For example, most galaxies at later times convert only about 20% of their available gas into stars. These findings suggest that the early universe may have had a different set of conditions that allowed for much faster and more efficient galaxy growth.
“Our research is transforming our understanding of early galaxy formation,” Mengyuan Xiao, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the UNIGE Faculty of Science, said in the statement.
The sun is once again extremely active. A massive sunspot is slowly turning towards Earth and is expected to spew out solar flares directly at us, leading to not just auroras but also radio blackouts. Named AR3901, the sunspot has already released some flares, with more expected in the coming days.
On Monday, the sun fired nine M-class solar flares, most of them originating from this active sunspot. Earth was not in the firing line of these flares, but when the spot turns towards the planet, things might go a little awry.
“Solar flare activity has remained at high levels with 10 M-Class, R1 (Minor) level flares over the period. Much of the activity has stemmed from Region 3,901 (S07E63, Dai/beta-gamma) which remains difficult to analyse due to foreshortening near the east limb,” NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) said in a forecast discussion.
However, Hassabis’ true breakthrough came just a month ago, when he and two colleagues from DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of AlphaFold, an AI tool capable of predicting the structure of the 200 million known proteins. This achievement would have been nearly impossible without AI, and solidifies Hassabis’ belief that AI is set to become one of the main drivers of scientific progress in the coming years.
Hassabis — the son of a Greek-Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother — reflects on the early days of DeepMind, which he founded in 2010, when “nobody was working on AI.” Over time, machine learning techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning began to take shape, providing AI with a significant boost. In 2017, Google scientists introduced a new algorithmic architecture that enabled the development of AGI. “It took several years to figure out how to utilize that type of algorithm and then integrate it in hybrid systems like AlphaFold, which includes other components,” he explains.
“During our first years, we were working in a theoretical space. We focused on games and video games, which were never an end in themselves. It gave us a controlled environment in which to operate and ask questions. But my passion has always been to use AI to accelerate scientific understanding. We managed to scale up to solving a real-world problem, such as protein folding,” recalls the engineer and neuroscientist.
Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable, and if so, when.
The “when” question in particular has driven researchers in Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. A new paper in Nature Communications makes their most compelling case to date that Mars’ life-enabling magnetic field could have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago, compared with previous estimates of 4.1 billion years—so hundreds of millions of years more recently.
The study was led by Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Sarah Steele, who has used simulation and computer modeling to estimate the age of the Martian “dynamo,” or global magnetic field produced by convection in the planet’s iron core, like on Earth. Together with senior author Roger Fu, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, the team has doubled down on a theory they first argued last year that the Martian dynamo, capable of deflecting harmful cosmic rays, was around longer than prevailing estimates claim.
An international team of astronomers has reported the detection of a new super-Jupiter exoplanet as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The newfound alien world, located some 1,430 light years away, is nearly four times as massive as Jupiter and is estimated to be only millions of years old. The discovery was detailed in a paper published November 13 on the pre-print server arXiv.
NGTS is a wide-field photometric survey focused mainly on the search for Neptune-sized and smaller exoplanets transiting bright stars. The project uses an array of small, fully robotic telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, operating at red-optical wavelengths. It uses the transit photometry method to find new exoworlds, which precisely measures the dimming of a star to detect the presence of a planet crossing in front of it.
Now, a group of astronomers led by Douglas R. Alves has found another extrasolar world with NGTS photometry. The new planet was identified around NGTS-33—a fast-rotating massive hot star.
Which of the nearly 6,000 known exoplanets have atmospheres? With help from JWST, astronomers are inching closer to an answer, and new observations of a super-Earth planet around a low-mass star help to define the dividing line between planets with atmospheres and planets without.
How to Find an Atmosphere
With the number of known exoplanets growing steadily larger, a major challenge for astronomers is deciding how to allocate limited telescope time to study these planets further. Rocky planets with atmospheres make promising targets, but it’s not obvious which exoplanets should have atmospheres. Taking cues from the planets in our solar system and the subset of exoplanets that have been studied in detail, researchers have defined the concept of the cosmic shoreline, which separates planets with atmospheres from planets without on the basis of escape velocity — related to a planet’s mass and size — and the amount of starlight the planet receives.
Upcoming moon missions will need to plan for how to respond to emergencies on the lunar surface.
Using various telescopes, an international team of astronomers has conducted a comprehensive study of a double-lined spectroscopic binary known as HD 34736. The study, published November 6 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, delivers important insights into the properties of this system.
So far, the majority of binaries have been detected by Doppler shifts in their spectral lines, hence these systems are called spectroscopic binaries. Observations show that in some spectroscopic binaries, spectral lines from both stars are visible, and these lines are alternately double and single. These systems are known as double-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB2).
HD 34,736 is an SB2 system consisting of two chemically peculiar late B-type stars, located some 1,215 light years away. Previous observations of HD 34,736 have found that the system has an extraordinarily strong magnetic field exceeding 4.5 kG. The effective temperatures of the primary and secondary star were found to be 13,700 and 11,500 K, respectively.
Normally found only in heavy metal bands or certain post-apocalyptic films, a “flame-throwing guitar” has now been spotted moving through space. Astronomers have captured movies of this extreme cosmic object using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope.
The new movie of Chandra (red) and Palomar (blue) data helps break down what is playing out in the Guitar Nebula. X-rays from Chandra show a filament of energetic matter and antimatter particles, about two light-years or 12 trillion miles long, blasting away from the pulsar (seen as the bright white dot connected to the filament).
Astronomers have nicknamed the structure connected to the pulsar PSR B2224+65 as the “Guitar Nebula” because of its distinct resemblance to the instrument in glowing hydrogen light. The guitar shape comes from bubbles blown by particles ejected from the pulsar through a steady wind. Because the pulsar is moving from the lower right to the upper left, most of the bubbles were created in the past as the pulsar moved through a medium with variations in density.
